The Time a P-38 Was Pulled From the Ice and Restored to Flying Condition

During World War II, as the United States was establishing a military presence in Great Britain in preparation for an invasion of mainland Europe, a squadron of six Lockheed P-38 Lighting fighter aircraft and two Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers were forced to make an emergency landing in the ice fields of Greenland because of bad weather. The crews were rescued nine days later without incident, but the eight planes were entombed in the ice and snow that accumulated in the ensuing decades.

One of those P-38s, now known as Glacier Girl, was extracted from the ice in 1992 by the Greenland Expedition Society, 50 years after it had been reclaimed by the Earth. Pat Epps and Richard Taylor of Atlanta had been searching for the lost planes for years, finally discovering them in 1988 thanks to new radar tech of the time. The planes had been carried two miles from their original location, and by the time they were found, they were under 264 feet of solid ice.

Epps and Taylor returned to the United States to assemble a group of engineers and investors to extract one of the planes. Over the course of multiple expeditions, the team sent a small steam probe through the ice, followed by a 264-foot long steel pipe. The Thermal Meltdown Generator, as it was called, followed the track of the pipe and tunneled a four-foot wide shaft through the ice, descending between two and four feet per hour (they ultimately made five tunnels from the surface to the P-38 below). Workers were then lowered into the ice where they carved a cavern around the plane using a hot-water cannon. The plane was then disassembled and brought to the surface, piece by piece.

The sections of Glacier Girl were eventually transported to Middlesboro, Kentucky, reassembled, and restored to flying condition. In October 2002, Glacier Girl took to the skies once again. It can now be seen in various air shows around the country.

The 1992 expedition was the subject of an Air & Space magazine feature story published in January 1993. Photographer Lou Sapienza documented the entire excavation for Air & Space. You can read the whole story on their website, and you can see dodgy scans of all Sapienza's amazing photos on a French message board. Or you could pick up one of the original copies of the 1993 magazine containing the story here.

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